How the Mazda Miata went from sketch to immortality

Our favorite little sports car hit the scene on Feb. 9, 1989.

Just as the Ford Mustang will forever be connected to the 1964 New York World's Fair, the Mazda Miata will always be able to trace its roots back to the Chicago Auto Show. On February 9, 1989, Mazda officially unveiled its all-new roadster, and as the Miata celebrates the 25th anniversary of its introduction, we take a look back at how this car came to be.

While the auto show is an important date for the Miata, its origin can actually be traced back to the late 1970s, when Bob Hall, then an automotive journalist, drew a sketch on a chalkboard for the head of Mazda's R&D, Kenichi Yamamoto. In his own words, Hall calls his drawing "crude," "ugly," and admits it "looked nothing like the final car." But it planted a seed that would eventually lead to Miata's birth as a small, lightweight, and affordable sports car. Three years after the chalkboard drawing, Hall was hired by Mazda's US design team, but instead of getting right to work on the Miata, he was tasked with designing vehicles like the Mazda B-Series truck and the MPV minivan.

After convincing his higher-ups that Mazda needed this affordable sports car, Hall said that three design ideas went far enough to make it to full-scale mockups. The US team came up with a front-engine/rear-drive car, Tokyo had a mid-engine/rear-drive concept, and there was also a front-engine/front-drive model (these three cars can be seen in the image below from left to right: FF, MR, and FR). With the goal of creating a daily driver that the public would actually want to drive, the FR layout won.

Dean Case, currently the communications officer for Mazda Motorsports, said that the final design was hammered out by 1986, but the car still lacked a proper name. At that time, the car was simply known as the P729; American and Japanese teams had different ideas of what to call the new sports car. The US team pushed for the name 1600S, while Japan wanted RX-5. Since this car lacked a rotary engine to justify the RX name, the name Miata (meaning "reward" or "prize") was settled upon.

About a year before the 1989 Chicago Auto Show, Mazda held customer clinics not only to gauge interest in the Miata but also to see how much money people would be willing to pay for it. Hall said that Mazda's internal pricing goal was set at around $8,800 to justify the project and be profitable, but the clinics showed that there was still a lot of upside. Most people guessed the car stickered closer to $20,000. In the end, the 1989 Miata had a base price of $13,800.

On top of that, initial sales goals were around 20,000 units per year in the US, but demand was much higher than projected. Mazda sold closer to 40,000 Miatas annually in the car's early years. Mazda's customer clinics also showed that the Miata had approval ratings a politician would kill for—85 to 90 percent of the participants liked the roadster, numbers that greatly exceeded what automakers normally expect to from such studies.

This general attraction to the Miata was even more apparent when the cars started to hit the roads. Weeks after the Miata made its official debut and was featured on the cover of Road & Track as well as many other buff books, Dean Case drove the car from Los Angeles back to Chicago, and he remembers noticing how much attention the Miata commanded from the public. Hall recalls having similar experiences as the car was being tested before its introduction.

Of course, the Miata wasn't the only sports car to debut at the 1989 Chicago Auto Show. The world also got its first look at the Acura NSX that year. After checking out the NSX, Hall said he knew that Acura "was going to get the press, but we [Mazda] were going to get the sales." Not only was he right on that count, but the Miata would go on to outlive its contemporaries, like the Toyota MR2 and Pontiac Fiero, and survive more recent competition from the likes of the Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky. More importantly, Hall credits the first-generation car's classic, simple design for the Miata's success, and he believes that the modern, trendy cues used on the second-gen NB Miata led to that design looking dated faster.

In the 106 years that Chicago has hosted its auto show, few cars have engendered the passion and longevity of the Mazda Miata. Looking ahead, Chicago should continue to play a big role in the Miata's ongoing success story. The all-new 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata is expected to debut there next year.